Does absence make the number a winner?

Wednesday 14 February 1996 00:02 BST

Click to followThe Independent Online

Apologies to those of our regular followers who spotted that our graphic recorded eight wins instead of six for ball number 12. This week it should be entirely accurate. Likewise apologies to those who follow the principle of choosing numbers that have not won for a large number of weeks. Although the text was up to date last week, the chart was not.

The theory which says that numbers that have not won for a long time are more likely to do so in future has aroused some controversy among our readers. Next week, we shall try to put the sequence theory to some kind of statistical test. Suffice it to say that a number of long-losing sequences have duly come to an end in recent weeks, and last week saw 14 win for the first time in 14 weeks, although 28 and 42 also both won for the second time in two weeks.

That leaves number 27, which has not now won for 15 weeks, as the longest- losing sequence, followed by 1 and 18, which have not dropped into the winning slots for 13 weeks, 19 and 46, with no wins for 11 weeks and 12 and 20, waiting 10 weeks without success.

None of the numbers with the poorest winning records came up last week, which means that number 39, with just two wins in 65 weeks, is by a long way the worst performer, followed by 13 with just four wins and one bonus appearance, and 24 with four wins, while 19 and 20 have won only five times in 65, and in both cases their last appearances were 11 and 10 weeks ago respectively.